St Lucy's Day

St. Lucia is the patron saint of the city of Syracuse (Sicily) where she was born and martyred in the reign of Diocletian. One story says that when a suitor admired her beautiful eyes she cut them out and sent them to him, asking to be left in peace thereafter (like most early Christian virgin martyrs, she refused marriage). Now she is the patron of eye diseases and the blind and is often depicted carrying her eyeballs on a plate.

The main celebration occurs today 13th of December and in May. St. Lucy is also popular among children in some regions of North-Eastern Italy, namely Trentino, East Lombardy and some parts of Veneto and Friuli, where she brings gifts to good children and coal to bad ones. Children are asked to leave some food for Lucia (a sandwich, or anything else available at the moment) and for the flying donkey that helps her carry gifts (flour, sugar, or salt), but they must not see Santa Lucia delivering gifts or she will throw ashes in their eyes, temporarily blinding them.

St Lucy’s Day in Italy is celebrated with torchlight processions and bonfires, clear indications of her role as light bringer. Apparently untroubled by the gruesome imagery, we eat St. Lucy’s eyes, cakes or biscotti shaped like eyeballs. In honor of a miracle performed by St Lucy during a famine in 1582 (she made a flotilla of grain-bearing ships appear in the harbor — the people were so hungry they boiled and ate the grain without grinding it into flour), Sicilians don't eat anything made with wheat flour on her day. Instead they eat potatoes or rice in the form of “arancine”, golden croquettes shaped and fried to the color of oranges and filled with chopped meats. In Palermo, everyone eats “cuccia”, a dessert of whole-wheat berries cooked in water, then mixed with sweet ricotta.